At DockerCon Amsterdam, An Under Fire Docker Makes A Raft Of Announcements

This week’s DockerCon event in Amsterdam was set to be a high profile showing – the first time this white-hot open source initiative was showcasing itself in Europe. The event was somewhat overshadowed by an announcement from CoreOS that it is launching a competitive containerization initiative. But notwithstanding the blemish, the event goes on and, as was expected, Docker (the company, not to be confused with the eponymously named open source initiative) is announcing a raft of developments. So what’s in the news?

Orchestration for multi-container applications

Some of CoreOS’ criticism about Docker was that it was going well beyond its initial focus on delivering a great container offering. That is to be expected as Docker looks for a viable business model. One of the directions it needs to go in is enabling multi container applications to be built and run. This is, after all, the way real enterprises build applications – an isolated container is pretty much useless in an enterprise development context. Docker is announcing platform services for orchestrating multi-container distributed applications. These orchestration capabilities are designed to enable developers and sysadmins to create and manage distributed applications that are composed of discrete interoperable Docker containers.

Docker’s orchestration capabilities are delivered through three new platform services that are designed to cover the different aspects of the lifecycle of distributed applications. The three new orchestration services are:

Docker Machine. This service expands the portability capabilities of distributed applications by providing the user the flexibility to provision any host with the Docker Engine, whether a laptop, a data center VM, or a cloud node

Docker Swarm. Docker Swarm is a Docker-native clustering service that works with the Docker Engines, provisioned by the new hosts service, and creates a resource pool of the hosts on which the distributed applications run

Docker Compose. This service provides developers with the ability to assemble applications from discrete, interoperable Docker containers completely independent of any underlying infrastructure, enabling distributed application stacks to be deployed anywhere and moved at any time

Docker Hub Enterprise (DHE)

DHE is new product addition for distributed applications which answers enterprise-specific functional needs. DHE delivers private repositories which can then access official Docker repos and the myriad of Dockerized services that exist in the Docker hub. DHE sits behind the firewall thus opening up Docker to many enterprises who can’t work in the public cloud. Essentially it takes the existing Docker Hub functionality and delivers it from behind the firewall.

Using DHE, enterprises are able to store, manage and collaborate on Docker images and follow their existing enterprise application workflow procedures. DHE has some big support – IBM, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services are all getting behind it in different ways.
IBM is integrating DHE with its own DevOps service and the Bluemix Container Service while
Microsoft is offering DHE within their own marketplace. For its part, DHE will be available as AWS Test Drives and AWS Quick Start Reference Deployments.

IBM in particular is trying to push itself as the most performant way to run Docker containers. The company is announcing the beta of IBM Containers which is a Docker-based container service which will include open Docker-native features and interfaces, including the new Docker orchestration services. Delivered as part of Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform for application development, the IBM Containers service is aimed at helping enterprises launch Docker containers directly onto the IBM Cloud on bare metal servers from SoftLayer.